The Attention of Her Hands

Roni was thirty-four years old and had been a flight attendant for nine years, and she could sleep in a middle seat in row 31 with a toddler kicking her elbow, but she could not sleep in an actual bed before dawn, which was why she was pulling into the gravel lot of the hermitage at 5:40 in the morning with a travel mug of gas station coffee and her bra on inside out.

She had told herself on the drive up from Narrows that this was just a weird morning, that her coworker Darcy had sworn by this place for two years and Darcy did yoga once and was insufferable about it forever, so the bar was low. The hermitage sat on a wooded ridge above town, a long low building of pine and glass with a steep roof, and there was one light on inside, warm yellow, and one woman standing at the door in a fleece pullover with her arms crossed against the cold.

"You must be Roni," the woman said. "I'm Rochelle. Darcy said you'd come."

"I'm here. Barely. I apologize in advance for whatever comes out of my mouth before sunrise, I don't fully control it."

Rochelle laughed at that, an actual laugh and not a polite one, and Roni decided maybe the morning wouldn't be a total loss. Rochelle was thirty-one, small and solid, with short hair and no makeup and the kind of calm that Roni usually found suspicious in people but was in no position to be suspicious of at 5:40 in the morning.

Inside, the practice hall was vaulted pine with a wall of windows facing east, and the whole ridge below was still dark blue. There were mats rolled along one wall and a row of bolsters and about eight folding chairs stacked in a corner, which told Roni this was a small operation. Rochelle took her coat and pointed her to a bench by the door to take her shoes off, and Roni sat down and took her shoes off and then remembered her coffee was still in the car and Rochelle said don't worry about it, sit, we have tea.

"Okay, so, full honesty," Rochelle said, sitting cross-legged on the floor across from her with two mugs. "The morning check-in is normally bigger. There's usually six or eight people. But the printer in the office died about an hour ago and I've been fighting with it, and I texted everyone to come at seven instead so I could fix it. So it's just us until then, if that's alright with you."

"That's fine. I once did a redeye with four passengers and one of them was my captain. I've had lonelier mornings."

"The printer thing is actually my fault, I jammed it trying to print the sign-in sheets and then I jammed it worse trying to fix the jam, so." Rochelle shrugged. "Some mornings you're the person who catches people and some mornings you're the person with toner on your hands."

Roni looked and sure enough there was a gray smudge on the heel of Rochelle's right hand, and something about that made her like her more. Rochelle explained the morning simply, without the soft voice Roni had braced for, no sing-song, no "we're going to set an intention." She said the place did a partner exercise called falling and catching, that it sounded gimmicky and wasn't, that one person stands behind the other and the other falls straight back and gets caught, and that the whole point is that your body learns something your head doesn't believe yet.

"I've read about this," Roni said. "Doesn't it end with everybody crying?"

"Sometimes. Usually it ends with people feeling embarrassed and then weirdly good. Crying is a bonus." She set her mug down. "We can just do breath work if you'd rather. But Darcy said you've had a year, and I'd suggest the falling."

Roni had indeed had a year, though she hadn't known Darcy had been keeping score. Three years in Narrows after her divorce, a rotating cast of app dates who were all fine and none of whom she'd wanted to see a second time, and a general feeling that she'd forgotten how to want anything on purpose. She'd said as much to Darcy on a jumpseat somewhere over Kansas and now here she was on a ridge before dawn.

"Okay," Roni said. "Falling. Let's do it before I think about it too hard."

Rochelle had her take off her hoodie and her socks, which felt strange until it didn't, and had her stand in the middle of the floor with her feet hip-width apart and her arms crossed over her chest, hands on her shoulders. Then Rochelle stood behind her, close, and put her hands lightly on Roni's arms, adjusting them, moving her elbows, and her hands were slow about it, deliberate, and stayed a half-second longer than they needed to at each spot, and Roni filed that away without deciding what the file was for.

"So you fall straight back," Rochelle said. "No bending at the waist. Your whole body, a board. I catch you across the arms and lower you to standing. Don't help me. That's the hard part, actually, not helping."

"Got it. Be a board."

"Want to fall on three or without a count?"

"On three, definitely on three."

The first time, Roni got to two and a half and then bent at the waist and caught herself, which she suspected was cheating, and Rochelle laughed kindly and said everybody does that. The second time Roni leaned back an inch and her legs locked like parking brakes, and she stood there shaking slightly and swearing under her breath at her own hamstrings.

"I'm so sorry," she said. "I flew through a storm over Denver once and my body was fine with that, and this is the thing that's got it spooked."

"That's actually the most common one I hear." Rochelle came around in front of her and stood close, looking up at her, and Roni noticed she had a small scar through one eyebrow and hands that looked like they'd done actual work. "Listen. Your body isn't spooked. It's just doing its job. It doesn't know me yet. So we tell it."

"How do we tell it?"

"I've got you," Rochelle said, and she put both hands on Roni's shoulders, steady, warm through the shirt, and didn't squeeze, just rested there. "Just close your eyes and tell your body it's safe. Out loud if you want. Nobody's listening but me."

Roni closed her eyes, which somehow made it worse and better at the same time. She could feel Rochelle's hands and the heat coming off her and the pine smell of the hall and the specific quiet of a building that wasn't an airplane. She said, out loud, feeling like an idiot, "You're safe," to her own body, and her body did not appear to believe her, but she let her weight rock back a little anyway.

"On three," Rochelle said from behind her again. "One. Two. Three."

And Roni fell. Actually fell, a board, straight back, no catching herself, and there was a half second where there was nothing under her and her stomach did the drop, and then Rochelle's arms were across hers, firm, and she was being lowered slowly, absurdly slowly, until her feet took her weight again, and she opened her eyes and the whole vaulted ceiling was spinning gently above the dark windows.

"Oh," she said. "Oh, that's. Okay. Wow!"

"Do it again?"

"Yes. Obviously yes!"

They did it four more times. By the third one Roni was falling without the count, which Rochelle said was the actual milestone, the moment you stopped negotiating with the floor. On the fifth one Roni's eyes were closed and her arms were crossed and she was thinking, briefly, unhelpfully, that she could not remember the last time she'd let anyone hold her up like this, literally or otherwise, and that the last date she'd been on, a dentist named Mark who'd talked about his fantasy football league for ninety minutes, had never once put his hands on her shoulders like they had all morning to stay there.

They sat down on the floor after, cross-legged, and Rochelle poured more tea from a thermos, and Roni's legs were humming and her face was flushed and the sky through the east windows had gone from black to a thin gray.

"So the printer," Roni said. "You still have to go fight that."

"The printer," Rochelle said, and sighed like someone who had lost a fight to an appliance. "Yes. The sign-in sheets for the seven o'clock group. If I don't have them my supervisor will talk to me about it in that tone."

"I fix things for a living, sort of. I mean, I fix cabin disasters. Not printers. But I've jammed a lot of overhead bins in my time, I understand the temperament."

Rochelle looked at her, and there was a small pause that Roni didn't have a name for yet.

"You could come watch me lose to it," Rochelle said, standing and brushing off her knees. "Misery likes company and the office is heated."

"Lead the way," Roni said, and got up to follow her down the hall, legs still humming, coffee finally cold in the mug she'd forgotten about twice.

They walked down the hall together and Rochelle pushed open the door to the office, which was really more of a converted closet with a desk, a filing cabinet, and the printer sitting on the filing cabinet like a dead pet. Roni looked at it and understood immediately that this machine had been through things.

"Okay," she said, setting down her mug. "Show me the patient."

The paper tray was jammed with six sheets folded at angles that should not have been possible for paper. Roni got both hands in there and started working them loose while Rochelle held a flashlight, because the office had exactly one overhead bulb and it buzzed in a way that suggested it was also thinking about dying.

"Six or eight people at seven, you said," Roni said, easing out a sheet with a corner torn off. "And they sign these?"

"They sign in and initial, yes. My supervisor reads them like scripture." Rochelle leaned on the desk and watched. "You're good at that."

"Nine years of digging tampons and headphones out of seat pockets. Paper is my medium."

It took four minutes and some swearing, and then the printer produced twenty warm sign-in sheets with a grudge in its tone. Rochelle stacked them, straightened the edges against the desk twice, and put a gray smudge of toner on the heel of her right hand in the process, which she noticed, sighed at, and did not wipe off.

"There," she said. "I owe you."

"You don't owe me anything. That was the most useful thing I've done in weeks." Roni leaned against the doorframe. The hall outside was quiet, the gray light getting stronger through the east windows. "Can I ask a dumb question? The falling thing. Is there more? Like a version two?"

Rochelle looked up from the sign-in sheets, and again there was that small pause Roni hadn't found a name for.

"There's a variation," she said. "We could do it. If you want. It's just us and eight folding chairs, and the seven o'clock people won't be here for another half hour."

"Yeah," Roni said, faster than she'd meant to. "Yes. Version two!"

* * *

Back on the mats, Rochelle explained it while they stood facing each other. Same falling, same catching, but this time when the faller rebounded, came back up off the catch, the catcher held her wrists.

"Holds them how?" Roni asked.

"Loose. Like this." Rochelle took Roni's wrists, one in each hand, her grip light, fingers resting on the soft inside where the pulse was. "Enough to guide. Not enough to grip. The faller comes back up and the hands are just there, saying which way."

Roni looked down at Rochelle's hands on her and had the strange, specific experience of being aware of every finger individually. Five points of contact on each wrist, warm, deliberate, and nothing about them was grabbing. It was more like being read. Her pulse was right there under one of those fingers, and there was no way Rochelle couldn't feel it, and that thought did something to her stomach that had nothing to do with falling.

"Okay," she said, and her voice came out half a tone off. "Turn around?"

She turned. Crossed her arms. Closed her eyes.

"Falling without the count now," Rochelle said from behind her. "Whenever you're ready."

Roni fell, and the catch came, and then the rebound, and this time there were hands on her wrists drawing her back up, guiding her spine into line, and she came up slower and straighter than she ever had on her own, and when she opened her eyes she was standing fully upright in the gray light with her arms uncrossed and Rochelle's fingers just leaving her skin.

"Huh," she said.

"Yeah?"

"That was. I don't know what that was. My whole back feels like it got ironed."

They did it again. And again. By the third one Roni had stopped performing and was just falling, trusting the empty air behind her, and every time she came up off the catch those hands were there on her wrists, patient, unhurried, holding her exactly as long as the motion needed and then letting go. On the fourth one she noticed she was holding her breath the whole time, waiting for the moment the fingers closed slightly, and they never did, and she realized she was disappointed.

They sat down on the mats afterward, facing each other, and Roni pulled her knees up and wrapped her arms around them.

"Can I tell you something embarrassing?" she said.

"People usually do, around here."

"I'm thirty-four years old. I've been a flight attendant for nine years, I've dated, you know, a normal embarrassing amount of app dating, three years of it since the divorce, a whole carousel of guys. And I cannot remember a single time I let anybody take my weight like that. Literally. Nobody's ever caught me falling. I didn't know I'd never done it until an hour ago."

Rochelle nodded slowly, the way people nod when they've heard a thing and are actually holding it.

"And you didn't know that was the exercise," she said. "That's the other half of it. The falling is the easy part. What people find out, mid-fall, is how long it's been since they let anybody do anything for them at all."

"God, don't say that to a flight attendant. I serve pretzels for a living. It's a whole career of doing things for people and letting nobody do anything back."

"Then this morning was probably overdue." Rochelle took a sip of tea, then set the thermos down between them, and Roni watched her choose her next words, actually watched it happen, the small pause before. "Can I ask you something? You don't have to answer."